President Trump blasts immigration law ruling made by his own Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch

The court's 5-4 decision concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent.

President Trump took a veiled shot at his own Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, on Tuesday, claiming that a ruling he made on immigration law perpetuates "a public safety crisis."

The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling — an unusual alignment in which Gorsuch sided with the four liberal justices for the first time — concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent. Gorsuch and the four liberal justices found that a provision of the law that makes it easier to deport foreigners convicted of "a crime of violence" is too vague to be enforced.

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Trump wasn't happy.

"Today's Court decision means that Congress must close loopholes that block the removal of dangerous criminal aliens, including aggravated felons," Trump tweeted. "This is a public safety crisis that can only be fixed by Congress — House and Senate must quickly pass a legislative fix to ensure violent criminal aliens can be removed from our society. Keep America Safe!"

Justice Neil Gorsuch takes a photo with his fellow justices at the Supreme Court building in June. (JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS)

The decision is a major loss for the Trump administration, which has pushed for stricter enforcement of immigration law.

With the four other conservative justices in dissent, Gorsuch's vote was decisive in striking down the provision. Gorsuch did not unequivocally agree with Justice Elena Kagan's opinion, but he concurred that the law could not be left in place. Gorsuch wrote that "no one should be surprised that the Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it."

The case turned on a decision from 2015 that struck down a similarly worded part of another federal law that imposes longer prison sentences on repeat criminals. The majority opinion in that case was one of the last written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. Gorsuch filled Scalia's seat after Trump appointed him shortly after taking office.

The decision is a loss for President Trump's administration, which has emphasized stricter enforcement of immigration law. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Kagan wrote that Scalia's 2015 decision "tells us how to resolve this case."

Tuesday's decision involves James Dimaya, a native of the Philippines who came to the United States legally as a 13-year-old in 1992. After he pleaded no contest to two charges of burglary in California, the government began deportation proceedings against him. The government argued among other things that he could be removed from the country because his convictions qualified as crimes of violence that allowed his removal under immigration law.

Immigration officials relied on a section of immigration law that lists crimes that make people eligible for deportation. The category in which Dimaya's convictions fell is a crime "that, by its very nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force ... may be used in the course of committing the offense."

Donald Trump in the White House

Immigration judges would have allowed Dimaya to be deported, but the federal appeals court in San Francisco struck down the provision as unconstitutionally vague. The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling Tuesday.

The decision does not interfere with the government's ability to deport people who are convicted of clearly violent crimes, including murder and rape, as well as drug trafficking and other serious offenses. The ruling is limited to a category of crimes that carry a prison term of more than a year, but do not otherwise comfortably fit in a long list of "aggravated felonies" that can lead to deportation.

The case was initially argued in January 2017 by a court that was short a member because of Scalia's death and the refusal of Senate Republicans to act on Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. Deadlocked 4-4, the justices scheduled a new round of arguments once Gorsuch joined the court.